If you ask them, they'll say it's because of their license. Steve has even indicated that prior to a few years ago they could be more loose with their content, but now must create games which adhere to the same results Ken Burnside posted on BGG that this stricter adherence coincided with the release of Abram's Trek in 2009, so whether they were given notice or whether it's simply precautionary because Paramount is again in the TOS era who knows (Ken also stated that he's skimmed the contents of their license with Paramount). Though I can't verify that last statement since Ken deleted his post shortly after making it. Either he thought twice about posting it, or someone asked him to take it down. But either way, his statement is in agreement time-wise with what SVC has said so I assume there is a bit of truth to it.

As they have that unicorn of Trek licenses, one that runs in perpetuity, I don't blame them for not wanting to jeopardise it and therefore err on the side of caution. Just a shame it didn't come out until years into the project.

Shadow Warrior wrote:As they have that unicorn of Trek licenses, one that runs in perpetuity, I don't blame them for not wanting to jeopardise it and therefore err on the side of caution. Just a shame it didn't come out until years into the project.

Yup. And in general they have blamed VBAM devs for the lack of adherence to the universe. But it's quite apparent that these restrictions were either not in effect back in those days, or not properly communicated. Though now ADB will say that neither one is true and any fault lies with Jay & whomever else.

The VBAM stats were derived from the Federation Commander ship cards available at the time (8+ years ago) and the scenarios were derived from F&E material, so I'm curious how we could possibly have deviated. If we did, since I did both the conversion and the scenario write-ups, it's all on me.

A while ago, we go to the point of replacing the original combat system (which was badly broken). I assigned two people to write a new one so I could pick between them and neither did what they promised. That threw it back on my desk and my schedule was already full. So when I get past a couple of projects I'll go see if I can strip the clutter out of the F&E system and use that.